The Dutch mobile-phone market looks set for a shake-up after five companies signed up to participate in a forthcoming spectrum auction.

Government agency Agentschap Telecom (AT) plans to award spectrum in six separate frequency bands ranging between 800MHz and 2600MHz.

Slots of 2x5MHz will be sold off in the 800MHz, 900MHz, 1800MHz, 1900MHz, 2100MHz and 2600MHz bands.

The regulator aims to begin the auction on October 31 and says license winners will be allowed to provide voice and data services using whatever technologies they like.

The regulator has not disclosed the identities of the five participants, but they are likely to include KPN (The Hague, the Netherlands), the former state-owned monopoly, as well as Vodafone (Newbury, UK) and Deutsche Telekom (Berlin, Germany), the Netherlands’ other two big mobile-phone operators.

Those companies will not, however, be eligible to bid for 2x10MHz of 800MHz spectrum and 2x5MHz of 900MHz spectrum, which AT has reserved for new entrants to the mobile-phone sector.

Other bidders could include Tele2 (Stockholm, Sweden), UPC (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and Ziggo (Utrecht, the Netherlands).

Tele2 is already active in the Dutch telecoms market, while UPC and Ziggo are the country’s two biggest cable companies.